Wednesday, quarter to nine in the evening. It’s raining and cold, outside Fontajau. The movement of cars is constant: fathers and mothers approaching to pick up their sons and daughters, who a few minutes ago finished their training. Others arrive, because their turn is about to begin. A vehicle stops, near the entrance to the site. The driver gets out and moves determinedly to the trunk, from where he takes out, folded, a wheelchair. Unfold it. The co-pilot’s door opens and a boy, just fifteen years old, about to turn sixteen, steps out. He holds himself up to stand. Hold to move laterally. He’s strong with his arms. He sits in the chair. It takes a while, not much, but it does it all by itself, without help. He says goodbye to his brother, who has accompanied him, and runs the wheelchair to the front of the pavilion door. He opens it and enters, a route he can do with his eyes closed because he practices it at least three times a week: on Mondays, Wednesdays and Fridays. Is Elias Banomarplayer of the Reha Girona Basketball Girona, the city’s wheelchair team.
Two and a half years, 16 and 29
“I was diagnosed with a spinal cord injury when I was two and a half years old. I can stand without support, but I can’t walk. All I remember of my life is always being in a wheelchair. I grew up sitting in the chair, the memory takes me nowhere else. I’m not like other players who have had an accident, for example, and have been left with the shock of before and after. I haven’t had one before, because I’ve always been like this”, he confesses. In wheelchair basketball, each player is assigned a medical score based on their mobility. The sum of the scores of the five people on the track cannot exceed 14.5. This is a system designed to balance the two teams competing in a match, so that at all times the degree of mobility is similar. Each person’s score can range from 1, the least mobility, to 4.5, the greatest. Banomar, who studies in the fourth year of ESO, has been assigned a 2.5. “I love basketball because it is played as a team, it makes you collaborate and you are constantly accompanied. It gives you the feeling of being united with other people and it is effective, as a method of rehabilitation because it helps you not only in physical matters, but also in mental ones.’
Pau Omedes, teammate, looks at him and nods. “It took a lot for me to assimilate my situation”, he admits. He suffered a traffic accident riding a motorcycle at the age of 16. He is now 32. “I still think about it, yes,” he says. He has an arthrodesis in his right ankle. “I have a normal life and it is difficult, at first glance, to identify that something is wrong with me. But when I’m standing for many hours, I can’t stand it, I need to stop». Omedes is considered, within wheelchair basketball, a ‘minimal handicap’. This means that you are on the verge of participating in this sport. In order to be able to register, he had to present a lot of documentation, because there have been cases of people who could practice traditional sports, but who signed up for a wheelchair team. To prevent this, controls have become much stricter over the years.
It is located in the middle of both Carlos Bermudez, the coach of RehaGirona Basketball Girona. His story is also exciting. “I had an accident at work in 1994, when I was 29 years old. I suffer from a complete spinal cord injury, I have no mobility or sensation from the waist down. It is hard to feel that there is no solution. At that time he had a family, a son, and a company. My life was done.” His world had suddenly changed completely. And thirty years ago things were not as we know them today. “Going down the street was a daily drama. Everything was on hold: the fact of being able to go to places, the adaptations to the sidewalks… Sometimes I had the feeling that they didn’t listen to us. Even more, even that they have used us as tools, especially when the elections come. Everyone wants the photo, but we take it because it’s the game there,” he admits. “Disability must be normalized”, all three defend, without fissures. “Society, from the outside, sees us much more differently than we do from the inside”, comments Bermúdez, who continues: “When I walk down the street, I don’t do it thinking ‘I’m in a wheelchair’. People look at me and maybe think so, but I don’t.”
The role of MIFAS and RehaGirona
As a result of his accident Bermúdez related to MYTHSa non-profit organization created in Girona in 1979 which works so that all people with physical disabilities can exercise their rights, live with independence and full integration, acting from three main axes: unity, vindication and services. Everything has been done there: player, technician, in charge of bureaucratic tasks, member of the board of directors and delegate to theAlt Emporda. Last season, the wheelchair team became part of the Girona Basketball structure, where it currently competes at level 1 of the Catalan League i a Second Divisionto the Spanish league. “For us it is a great speaker, clearly, because we need and want visibility. Marc Gasol already met with us about this idea six or seven years ago and he has made it a reality”, points out the coach, grateful for the entry of the main sponsor, RehaGirona, a company that provides high quality comprehensive solutions for active mobility, involved in the renovation and improvement of the team’s wheelchair equipment through clinical assessments and technical advice. “Precisely, three new chairs have just arrived,” boasts Bermúdez. Each chair is customized according to the characteristics presented by each person: the less mobility they have, the lower the chair is to have more balance.
“Adapted sport has progressed in all areas, especially in the material: the boom it’s beastly Now, the chairs have two wheels at the back so that they don’t tip over and the player is held onto them; they don’t fall from there, and if they do, they fall together. In my time you fell off the chair, with a crash, or simply fell backwards. It was all very different. And there are professional clubs, with foreign players and charging a lot of money”, describes the coach. “People are surprised when they see a match, because there is intensity. We go out to win, we don’t come to hang out. It is true that it is a fundamental part of reintegration, but when you go out on the track you do it to compete. Society’s vision is changing, but it still costs.” The logistics are also not simple: for a trip, the team travels in a pair of vans adapted from MIFAS. “If there are ten players, that means there are ten wheelchairs. And you have to add the five that we usually wear on the street. We’re well loaded.”
“Everyone has their own experiences and this is reflected in our personality”, explains Banomar. Replica Omedes. “We receive information from everyone around the team and we all support each other.” Bermúdez takes the floor: “What helps you is to find someone who has suffered, even if it’s not the same, because you share an experience. Just by solving aspects such as the issue of medication, knowing if it is useful or should be discarded, or how you can move better to go from the chair to the car. Only those who have experienced it can transmit it to the people who are experiencing it. Especially, to the new ones, to those who have just had the injury. There are subsidized programs where there are people assigned to educate people who leave the hospital, to guide them with respect to the new life they will find and how to solve problems.’
Obviously, each profile is studied differently, as Bermúdez assures. “In my case, I had an active working life, so I was left with a pension, which is similar to a fair salary. It won’t make me shoot forever, but it makes a few things easier for me. But if you have never quoted, it will be minimal.” “They took it away from me in 2019”, protests Banomar. “It was because of a dependency issue. This term no longer means that you live with your parents, but that you can shower and dress yourself. If you can do it, they believe that aid no longer has a reason to be.’ “In the changes that have been made to the laws in the last few years, which often seem silly, you find things like this”, clarifies the technician.
labor market
Omedes, who is a pastry chef, explains that “at most I can work six hours straight, after four I no longer feel well. And whoever hires you benefits from the aid and you continue to have crappy contracts, as a pawn”. Companies receive financial aid to hire people with disabilities and, at the same time, workers have a very restricted labor market, because they cannot do according to what. For many years, MIFAS has had a branch in which they guide those people who need to integrate into the labor market, through its job exchange. “I’ve thought about what will happen when I have to work,” says Banomar, “but I don’t think it can be scary. It is true that, by law, a percentage must be left for people with disabilities, but to what extent is it respected? What kind of people are they for? The places are somewhat fictitious.” “They are usually reserved for janitors or cleaning people and that makes me a little desperate. It’s not that you don’t want to do it, but if you have training (of whatever kind) and you want to dedicate yourself to it, when you look for work you can’t find it”, says Omedes, who will go to a flat when the training is over that the club has reserved for its players, he will spend the night there and leave the next day by train Barcelona. Omedes is not the only one who is not from the city.
“We had the goal of going to the play-off in the National League (out of six teams, four qualify), but it’s been a little complicated for us. But we hope that people will come to see us in Fontajau, because there will be an indescribable spirit of overcoming”, emphasize three members of the RehaGirona Basketball Girona. The others are in Joseph Tatchéin Victor Niubóin Save Huescasin Raul Ortizin Manu Herasl’Angel Columbusl’Ander Bermúdezin Javier Aldamiin Franklin Gonzalez in a David Joffre. They are a great example.